Lunt-Fontanne Theatre

205 West 46th Street,

New York,
NY10036

The “last picture show” at the Globe Theatre was Elia Kazan’s “A Face In The Crowd,” which opened with a world premiere performance on May 28th, 1957, and ran for nine weeks, closing on July 28th, according to Variety. Images have been posted in the Photos Section.

A February 1, 1998 NYT article on this theatre mentions that it opened with a feature unique to Broadway history. As a tribute to its namesake, the open-air Shakespeare Globe in London, this Globe had a sliding roof that could open up to the sky on hot weather days. They speculate that soot and litter may have limited the use as it was a problem for other nearby roof top operations.

I was just reading a 1989 NYT article about the Nederlander organization looking for a movie multiplex operator to split it up because the theatre was too narrow and therefore awkward for live musical theatre. Here we are twenty three years later.

Check out Stanley Kubrick’s “Killer’s Kiss” where one scene takes place at night in Times Square. The Globe is playing “How to Marry a Millionaire in 1953. The action goes indoors for a minute then is outside again and the Globe is now playing "Beachhead” with Tony Curtis, from 1954. Guess it didn’t take Kubrick two years to shoot the film, but apparently it did take a while.

I just found a blurb in an old copy of MARQUEE (Volume 18, 1986) that mentions the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s theatre which was showing films in 1976. It states that the RFK was actually the Walter Kerr/Ritz at 219 West 46th Street and not this location.

Here is the text of the Times article about the old Globe facade and entrance: (sorry I couldn’t edit out the photo captions)

An Old Player for the Stage, Soon to Be Heard No More

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: April 5, 2006

Every so often, Times Square, that most public of places, will give up a secret it has harbored for decades.
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Keith Bedford for The New York Times

A piece of the Globe Theater on Broadway near 46th Street is visible above the present scaffolding.
Enlarge This Image
R. M. De Leeuw

The white facade of the theater entrance as it appeared in 1910, when it opened.

Now on view near the corner of 46th Street â€" but not for much longer â€" is a fragment of the Broadway facade of the 96-year-old Globe Theater, which was hidden for a half-century behind jumbo signs far taller than its four stories.

Demolition is under way on the Globe and an adjoining 111-year-old building, 1551 Broadway, the home until recently of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and the Gaiety Male Burlesk theater. They are to be replaced by a two-story store that will have large signs and lights on top. “We look at it as a premier retail opportunity,” said Gerard T. Nocera, the chief operating officer of S. L. Green Realty Corporation.

The theatrical producer Charles B. Dillingham built the Globe in 1910 as an L-shaped structure with entrances both on Broadway and 46th Street. (The auditorium still exists, as does the 46th Street facade, which is a landmark.)

Today, a half-dozen windows and the trace of a cornice are all that remain of the Globe on Broadway. The pediments, garlands, cherubim, comic masks and tragic masks designed by CarrÃ¨re & Hastings are nowhere to be seen. Yet this is unmistakably the “modest, jewellike front” described in 1910 by The New York Times.

It was at the Globe in 1916 that a young British-born actress named Lynn Fontanne made one of her first American appearances in “The Harp of Life,” giving a performance that The Times called “notably direct, eloquent and moving.” It was at the Globe that Fanny Brice sang “Second Hand Rose” in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921.

And it was at the Globe in 1953, during its cinema phase, that New Yorkers first peered through polarized glasses at a full program of stereoscopic films. Bosley Crowther of The Times was underwhelmed and leery of the 3-D craze, asking readers to imagine Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis appearing to be “so real and close they could reach out and almost touch you!

“One-dimension is quite enough for them!”

The Broadway entrance was severed from the rest of the auditorium four years later when it was reclaimed as a legitimate playhouse. Miss Fontanne returned for the reopening in 1958, appearing with her husband Alfred Lunt in “The Visit.” The theater was renamed the Lunt-Fontanne and the Globe disappeared for the first time. But not the last.

Al… IBDB.COM (the Internet Broadway DataBase) shows the Lunt-Fontanne as being dark for two periods in 1976 – from the December 8th 1975, until April 25th of ‘76 and then again from June 6th until December 8th of '76. I would think that the theatre would have been busy during at least some of this down time prepping for the next legitimate show to open and I wouldn’t think that there’d have been a whole lot of time for a name change and film bookings. Surely by April 2, the show that opened on April 25th (a play called REX) would have been in rehearsals or in previews.